Highlights of Ohio State Mansfield Faculty Scholarship, Creative Endeavors, and Outreach
For references and copies of publications, visit:Ohio State Mansfield Faculty Publications & Creative Activities
Creativity and Scholarship Flourish in the Arts & Humanities
Cynthia Callahan, English, an expert in adoption literature, recently published two articles in the journals Adoption and Culture and Multi-Ethnic Literature of the United States, all while organizing a major conference on the topic!
What’s Glenn Hartz, Philosophy, up to? Well, he may be our Leibniz expert, but he also knows a thing or two about Descartes, as we saw in his latest 2018 article.
Steve Joyce, German and Comparative Studies, has published more than 50 papers and individual poems in his career, as well as four books, including a beautiful new book of poems, A Sea of Other, out this year.
PMLA is the flagship journal in language and literature with one of the highest circulations in any of the humanities. It’s also where Jamison Kantor, English, published his latest work. In addition, Kantor published three papers in 2017 and presented at the international conference on Romantic literature.
Elizabeth Kolkovich, English, tackles Shakespeare from all angles. Her three recent essays explore how dances in his plays address gender and race, how ideas about one character change over time, and how women worked together to make theater in Shakespeare’s time.
Having her work exhibited in nine academic art galleries in the past two years across the country (from New York to Colorado), was not enough for Kate Shannon, Art. She also won the first place juror's award for her part in the Empathy exhibition in North Carolina! Check out her work at: https://www.kateshannon.net/creative-work.html
Taking part in juried and solo exhibitions in Ohio and Indiana, John Thrasher, Art, still found time last year to write a proceedings paper for a conference in Corfu, Greece where he was also a visiting professor. See more at: https://voicesfromtheborderland.wordpress.com/2018/09/26/the-artwork-of-john-thrasher-at-main-street-books/
“Publish or Perish” in the Natural and Social Sciences
Did you know that even microorganisms like bacteria and algae can get viruses? Steve Abedon, Microbiology, published his seventh book, Viruses of Microorganisms, which contains three chapters on this topic: https://www.caister.com/vom. He’s so prolific that in 2018 alone he published six other book chapters and co-authored three papers, including one with Tena Katsounis, Statistics, her second publication this year.
Check out Amy Brunell, Psychology, blasting myths about narcissism in US News and World Report: https://health.usnews.com/wellness/mind/articles/2018-07-23/10-myths-about-narcissism. They interviewed her because she is an expert in this field, publishing the Handbook on Narcissism this year and five other research papers since 2017. She will give an invited talk at a conference in Paris in 2019.
Can nasty chemicals leach from your plastic bottle into your water? Ozeas Costa, Earth Science, examined how temperature and storage time can impact such leaching in a 2017 publication.
What does a predator do when it hears its lunch alarm calling? If it relies on ambush hunting, it moves off the other way to look for an easier snack to sneak up on. This experiment in the jungles of Peru used recordings of monkeys played to radio collared ocelots by Dawn Kitchen, Anthropology, and her grad student. Other recent publications by Kitchen include two on howler monkey behavior and three encyclopedia entries.
What could be more serene than study plants and their insect pollinators? Getting to do that research in the Bahamas! That has been the topic of 4 recent publications by Carol Landry, EEOB. Although it’s not all fun in sun – she also looked at the devastating effects of hurricanes on biodiversity.
Del Lindsey, Psychology, published four papers in the last two years that build on his work assessing cultural differences in how colors are perceived and communicated within language communities. With over 65 lifetime publications on this and other topics, it’s no wonder Lindsey has been the featured speaker at meetings from California to Washington D.C.!
Phil Mazzocco, Psychology, has a wide palate for research, publishing articles as diverse as how poverty affects early childhood education to one on religious hypocrisy. A discussion of his 2017 book, The Psychology of Racial Colorblindness, can be found here: https://insights.osu.edu/life/racial-colorblindness
Did you know you have a diverse community of tiny creatures living in your gut? It may sound yucky, but microbiota can be important for your health. Agus Muñoz-Garcia, EEOB, published multiple papers in the last few years including studies of how these tiny creatures regulate metabolic rate, using not humans but our friendly neighbor, the cockroach.
Ever wonder how our brain tries to gauge when we will tip over or how hard it will be to climb an incline? These questions interest Dennis Shaffer, Psychology. With five publications in the last two years, Dr. Shaffer is one of several faculty on campus who include students in their research. You can find the summary of one paper, co-authored with nine Mansfield undergraduates, here: https://news.osu.edu/when-scientists-push-people-to-their-tipping-point/.
Retired but Still Shaping Knowledge
Tim Berra, Academy Professor & Emeritus EEOB, seems torn between studying Australian fish species in which males carry eggs on their head, and writing about the life (including the effects of inbreeding!) of Charles Darwin and his family. Clearly alive and well, adding four recent publications to his impressive list of 85 since 1969, Dr. Berra calls this—https://issuu.com/australianamericanfulbright/docs/mindshearts_mar17— his “obituary” (p. 12). Meanwhile, in a complete change-of-pace, he has recently published a book entitled Bourbon: What the Educated Drinker Should Know. The research was fun, (hiccup!), he claimed.
Surfaces, curves, and monster towers, oh my!Gary Kennedy, Emeritus Mathematics, continues to churn out publications on topics not for the faint of heart, including one with Lee McEwan, Emeritus Mathematics.
Retirement has not stopped Barbara Lehman, Emeritus Education, who has written four research articles on children’s literature in the last two years, including one with Evelyn Freeman, Emeritus Education.
Teaching while Learning
Think math can’t be fun? Well, then you haven’t learned math from a teacher trained by the OSU Math Literacy Initiative. Terri Bucci, Education, and Lee McEwan, Emeritus Mathematics, make Math compelling by helping teachers improve delivery of difficult topics to children. Dr. Bucci recently gave a compelling TedX talk on this topic.
When Stavros Constantinou, Geography, is not presenting papers across the country on how to use ethnic communities as population categories, he is running a fantastic study abroad program in his native Cyprus. The impact of his course, Geography of the European Union, is even bigger than the sum of its parts. Read this student testimonial on the abroad program: https://oia.osu.edu/educationabroad/education-abroad-profiles/5225-buckeyes-abroad-brianna-cunningham.html
Staying on the cutting edge of college-level teaching is also important to our faculty, many of who spoke at the Association of University Regional Campuses of Ohio Conference held on our campus in April 2018, organized by Ozeas Costa, Earth Sciences. For example, Suma Robinson, Biology, gave a talk on how to use a team-based approach to connect Biology courses for non-majors to "real-life."
Community Outreach
Finalist! As of January Kip Curtis, History, and his collaborators, have made it to the last round in the competitive Alliance for the American Dream initiative (https://americandream.osu.edu/ideas), with plans to bring farm quality food to impoverished urban communities throughout Richland County. Competing in Arizona this year, the team will know by summer if they have been granted the $13.6 million in funds to conduct this six-campus project. The project is a scaled-up version of one they were invited to submit to the Foundation for Food and Agriculture Research (https://foundationfar.org/seeding-solutions/).
Updated: January 14, 2019